How to Test your Employees Thinking Abilities

Today’s work environment demands employees with high cognitive abilities to help make quick and accurate judgments on any work situation that arises. Customers will come with diverse needs or complaints and they require workable answers immediately.

To help create better relationships between companies and customers, employers and employees and work colleagues, employers need to hire workers with high thinking abilities. One of the best ways to help determine this ability is to take employees through a critical thinking ability test and it can be done in various ways.

Challenge them with hypothetical questions

You can customize your employees’ cognitive test quiz by preparing a set of questions that will help measure their thinking abilities in several ways. You can redeem the time by using the already customized online questions from reputable websites.

A hypothetical question will require an employee to provide solutions using partial information provided by the employer. The employee will be required to think about what information is missing which is necessary to help them give a conclusive decision.

The employee will have a chance to weigh the questions from several points of view and probably ask further questions as they seek the most relevant answers. You may ask questions like – a high-ranking manager makes a report and circulates it to important stakeholders. Suddenly, you notice a sensitive mistake in the report. What would be your best approach in handling the situation?

Let them write solutions to a set of work related challenges

In this approach, give your employees some questions that require them to think deeper and come up with solutions. It could be a math question that requires them to calculate and find solutions to product costs, change amount required, expenditure, balances, and so on. Let them explain in writing how they arrived at their conclusion.

For example, the Wonderlic sample test has several sets of questions that require candidates to calculate the number of products bought by two individuals with a combined total of $X. It also contains questions that require a candidate to think about the final shape of a box after it’s folded.

These are questions that will challenge your employees to think deeper to get correct answers. If you require them to write how they arrived at the answers, you will be able to tell if the employee has a high thinking ability or not.

Let the employee explain a work situation they faced before and how they solved it

Daily at work, employees face many challenges that require their input in terms of critical thinking to come up with the best solutions. As they provide answers to each challenge, they become better thinkers and problem solvers.

To be sure that you have the right team in your business, ask an employee to orally describe to you a sensitive work situation they had to deal with and the approach they used to provide a solution. Listen keenly as they narrate the situation and judge for yourself if that was the right or best approach to handle such a situation.

You may want to know what brought about the situation and judge if the employee was responsible or not. You may also directly pose a question to them like narrate a situation where it was important for you to convince your workmates or managers to use alternative ways of solving a work challenge.

Provide them with a set of multiple-choice questions

Multiple-choice questions may look simple, but they are the trickiest types of questions. The employee will be required to answer a certain number of questions within a specific time. They will have brain-teasing questions, real work situations, math, observations, and so on.

Each question will have a certain number of marks and the entire set can be out of 30, 50, 70, and so on. You will be testing your employees on how fast they can think and provide the most relevant answer to any work situation.

Take them on the work ground

Unless an employee faces a real work situation, they might never learn to push themselves beyond limits and get answers. If you are comfortable enough, take the employee on the ground and observe them handle real work situations.

If you want to play it safe, talk to a client and let them understand you are testing your employee. Create a situation and send the client to them to present their complaint or question and you will be able to put the employee’s thinking capacity to the limits.